The Republican Party is dividing into two kinds of chickens--chickenhawks and chickendovers. The chickenhawk specialty is warmongering despite being completely unwilling to serve in the military. John Wayne is probably the Jesus figure of the chickenhawk movement, but Dick Cheney is their current spiritual leader. Having gotten his wife pregnant to get his fifth deferment from the military during the Vietnam War, Cheney became a prominent hawk as he climbed the political ladder. In fact, Cheney seems to have decided that war is the best solution to just about any foreign relations problem. The same is the case with George Bush, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and the rest of the chickenhawk wing of the Republican Party.
Max Blumenthal has a great little segment on chickenhawks among College Republicans.
But the Republicans are developing a chickendove section as well. Richard Lugar, John Warner, George Voinovich, and Susan Collins have all come out against the surge, but they refuse to vote against the Bush administration on Iraq-related legislation. Most of the chickendoves voted to support Mitch McConnell's filibuster of the most recent Democratic proposal to withdraw from Iraq. In the case of Susan Collins, she voted against the filibuster but was going to vote against the withdrawal bill as well.
You have to have some sympathy for Republican chickendoves. They're going to get the shaft wherever they turn. If the chickendoves support the war, they lose the support of marginal Republican voters, independents, and weak Democrats they need to win. That will kill them in the general election and Susan Collins for one is going to face tough Democratic opposition.
But if they oppose the war, they lose the support of the Republican base which will either get them a tough primary opponent (see Lincoln Chaffee) or kill the party's enthusiasm for a general election campaign.
Still, politics is a tough game and the war in Iraq is the overriding issue in American political life. If Republican fence-sitters can't make up their minds about the war, they shouldn't be in office.
The Republican Party--cowards whichever way you turn.
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Related and articulated in a manner far superior to my own:
Special Comment: Keith Blasts Bush Scapegoating: “This is YOUR War.”
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/07/19/special-comment-keith-blasts-bush-scapegoating-this-is-your-war/
text:
Good evening from Los Angeles. And we begin with a Special Comment, on this day’s ominous, almost indescribable events.
It is one of the great, dark, evil lessons, of history.
A country — a government — a military machine — can screw up a war seven-ways-to-Sunday… it can get thousands of its people killed… it can risk the safety of its citizens… it can destroy the fabric of its nation.
But as long as it can identify a scapegoat, it can regain… or even gain power.
The Bush Administration has, tonight, opened this Pandora’s Box, about Iraq.
It has found its scapegoats — Hillary Clinton — and us.
The lies and terror-tactics with which it deluded this country into war — they had nothing to do with the abomination that Iraq has become — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.
The selection of the wrong war, in the wrong time, in the wrong place — the most disastrous a geo-political tactic since Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in 1914 and destroyed itself in the process — that had nothing to do with the overwhelming crisis Iraq has become — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.
The criminal lack of planning for the war — the total “jump-off-a-bridge-and-hope-you-can-fly” tone to the failure to anticipate what would follow the deposing of Saddam Hussein — that had nothing to do with the chaos in which Iraq has been enveloped — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.
The utter, blinkered idiocy of “staying the course” — of sending Americans to Iraq, and sending them a second time, and a third, and a fourth, until they get killed or maimed — the utter de-prioritization of human life, simply so a politician can avoid having to admit a mistake — that had nothing to do with the tens of thousand individual tragedies darkening the lives of American families, forever — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.
The continuing, relentless, remorseless, corrupt and cynical insistence that this conflict somehow is defeating, or containing, or just engaging the people who attacked us on 9/11 — the total “Alice Through The Looking Glass” quality that ignores that in Iraq, we have made the world safer for Al-Qaeda — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault!
The fault, brought down — as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter, by a nearly anonymous Under-Secretary of Defense — the fault has tonight been laid on the doorstep of Senator Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American — the now vast majority of us — who have dared to criticize this war, or protest it, or merely ask questions about it, or simply, plaintively, innocently, honestly, plead, “don’t take my son; don’t take my daughter.”
Senator Clinton has been sent — and someone has leaked to the Associated Press — a letter, sent in reply to hers, asking if there exists, an actual plan for evacuating U.S. troops from Iraq.
This extraordinary document was written by an Under-Secretary of Defense named Eric Edelman.
“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq,” Edelman
writes, “reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.” Edelman adds: “such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”
A spokesman for the senator says Mr. Edelman’s remarks are “at once both outrageous and dangerous” and those terms are entirely appropriate and may in fact understate the risk the Edelman letter poses to our way of life, and all that our fighting men and women are risking, have risked, and have lost, in Iraq.
After the South was defeated in our Civil War, the scapegoat was Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the ideas of the “Lost Cause” and “Jim Crow” were born.
After the French were beaten by the Prussians in 1870 and 1871 — it was the imaginary “Jewish influence” in the French Army General Staff, and there was born 30 years of self-destructive anti-Semitism, culminating in the horrific Dreyfus case.
After the Germans lost the First World War, it was the “back-stabbers and profiteers” at home, on whose lives the National Socialists rose to prominence in the succeeding decades, and whose accused membership eventually wound up in torture chambers and death camps.
And after the generation before ours, and leaders of both political parties, escalated and re-escalated, and carpet bombed and re-carpet bombed, Vietnam, it was the protest movement and Jane Fonda and as late as just three years ago Senator John Kerry, who were assigned the kind of blame with which no rational human being could concur, and yet which still, across vast sections of our political landscape, resonates, unchallenged, and accepted.
And now Mr. Bush, you have picked out your own Jefferson Davis, your own Dreyfus, your own “profiteer” — your own scapegoat.
Not for the sake of this country…
Not for the sake of Iraq…
Not even for the sake of your own political party…
But for the sake of your own personal place in history.
But in reaching for that place, you have guaranteed yourself tonight, not honor, but infamy.
In fact, you have condemned yourself to a place among that remarkably small group of Americans whom Americans cannot forgive. Those who have sold this country out, and who have willingly declared their enmity to the people at whose pleasure they supposedly serve.
A scapegoat, sir, might be forgivable, if you hadn’t just happened to choose a prospective presidential nominee of the opposition party. And the accusation of spreading “enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” might be some day atoned for, if we all didn’t know — you included, and your generals, and the Iraqis — that we are leaving Iraq, and sooner rather than later — and we are doing it, even if to do so requires first, that you must be impeached and removed as President of the United States, sooner, rather than later.
You have set this government at war against its own people, and then blamed those very people when they say, “enough.”
And thus it crystallizes, Mr. Bush.
When Civil War General Ambrose Burnside ordered a disastrous attack on Fredericksburg in which 12,000 of his men were killed, he had to be physically restrained from leading the next charge himself.
After the First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, authored and enabled the disastrous Gallipoli campaign that saw a quarter million Allied Soldiers cut down in the First World War, Churchill resigned his office and took a commisson as a front-line officer in the trenches of France.
Those are your new role models, Mr. Bush.
Let your minions try to spread the blame to the real patriots here, who have sought only to undo the horrors you have wrought since 2002.
Let them try it, until the end of time.
Though the words might be erased from a million books and a billion memories, though the world be covered knee-deep in your lies, the truth shall prevail.
This, sir, is your war.
Senator Clinton has reinforced enemy propaganda? Made it impossible for you to get your ego-driven, blood-steeped win in Iraq?
Then take it into your own hands, Mr. Bush.
Go to Baghdad now and fulfill, finally, your military service obligations. Go there and fight, your war…yourself.
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